Reversing national stereotypes: Clemence Poesy and Stephen Dillane in The Tunnel

It comes as a shock when you discover that one of the stars of your favourite TV series does not share your passion for that series.

Stephen Dillane, who plays the fanatical Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones, confesses he’s only seen a few episodes of the show, because “I don’t have the attention span for these things. Something like Game of Thrones is pretty tough watch. It takes a lot to get me sat down in front of something that’s going to take ten hours out of my life.”

If you look back on it, you probably see somebody standing there looking pretty bewildered, wondering what on earth is going on

The only clue he can offer on whether Stannis achieves his goal of becoming king of Westeros is that he is booked to appear in the next series – “but how much of the next series, and whether I survive it, I don’t know. I’m assuming nothing. Maybe if you spoke to Peter Dinklage [who plays the hero, Tyrion Lannister] you’d get a different story, but I’m sort of on the periphery of the whole thing, so I turn up, do a few days filming in Northern Ireland and go away again. It really is a functional existence, in a way, the Stannis plot for me.”

Nick Russell is a calming influence on Melissa Bergland in Winners & Losers

I was supposed to be interviewing Dillane about his new show, The Tunnel, which starts on ABC1 on Sunday. It’s a British version of the Danish crime series The Bridge, and Dillane plays a British cop who has to work with a French cop when a corpse is found in the Channel Tunnel on the borderline between French territory and British territory.

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I asked Dillane to describe his character, Karl Roebuck, and he offered this description: “He seems to me to be somebody who is fairly outgoing, cheerful, relaxed, enjoys his life, likes to take things fairly lightly, although maybe he’s got a serious streak through him. He’s obviously been a one for the women in the past, and I imagine he likes a drink and a smoke as well. He’s a high achieving working class boy, who went off to university and decided to join the police force out of a sense of service.”

Dillane was interested in the role because Karl differs from most of the “noir” detectives currently onscreen: “We get loaded with miserable detectives over here. I just go ‘Do I really want to sit there and feel this tense right now?’ But this seemed to be one who had a fairly light take on life, and that was an attractive idea, I thought.”

James Valentine knows entertainment

By contrast, Clemence Poesy plays the French detective, Elise Wasserman, as ultra-grim -- a woman likely to be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Dillane describes her thus: “She is rational, slightly sociopathic in a way, perhaps lacking empathy. The ordinary lies and deceptions that we make in in our everyday life are not available to her. She’s legalistic in her thinking in a way that Karl isn’t. That seems to be the basis of their difficulties with each other.”

Dillane likes how this reverses the usual national stereotypes that the British are reserved while the French are “more emotionally available”. I remarked that Poesy’s character is like Stannis Baratheon. Dillane laughed. “I’ll have to tell Clemence that. You’re the first person to have drawn a comparison between Elise and Stannis, but I see where you’re coming from.”

So what kind of character summary or back story did the writers of Game of Thrones give Dillane when they hired him to play Stannis? “They didn’t. I had to fish around to get any sort of information and even then it was just ‘Oh he’s won a few battles’ and the rest of it I had to glean from the scripts. I had no idea at all, really, and that probably shows. If you look back on it, you probably see somebody standing there looking pretty bewildered, wondering what on earth is going on and where this is leading. You just have to trust that the fact that you’re in the dark is in some way playing out well.”

The Tunnel starts at 9.30pm Sunday on ABC1. The final episode of Game of Thrones season 4 is on the Foxtel channel showcase at 3.30pm and 7.30pm Monday, but Stephen Dillane was unable to tell me if he’s in it.

With one bound, he was free of the law

It might be wishful thinking, but Nick Russell likes to believe the writers of Winners and Losers see his character, Gabe Reynolds, as “a kind of cool geek … a little bit nerdy but in a chic way, not the coolest bloke at school but he has grown to be comfortable with who he is.”

That certainly seems to be Russell’s own story. He dreamed of being an actor in high school, but did a science degree and then a law degree and worked in a Melbourne law firm before deciding he had grown up enough to take a risk.

“Everyone always says you need a backup plan, because acting is such a fickle industry,” Russell says. “Law was meant to be my backup plan but I found myself floating down this career river and about 18 months ago I sort of woke up and said ‘At what point did my plan B become my life, and why is that taking up 80 hours a week?’ So I decided to make the move and I thought if I try and fail, then so be it, but at least I’ll know either way.”

He auditioned for the role of a man who has a one-night stand with Jenny Gross, a central character in Winners and Losers (she’s the daggy bespectacled redhead played by Melissa Bergland). Apparently the producers thought they were suited to a fuller relationship, as Russell explains:

“They came back and said ‘There’s this other character that Jenny has chemistry with, that she meets in the call centre, and he’s a bit more grounded.’ On paper and as it evolves they are sort of the perfect match for one another.

“There are obstacles in the way, because Gabe has a girlfriend, but he’s also having these feelings for Jenny. He’s like a fun, smart, guy that takes the edge of Jenny’s serious and over the top reactions to things. He’s the ying to her yang.

“Sometimes Jenny has a tendency to think the world’s caving in around her because of one small thing that’s happened to her. Gabe’s the sort of person who says ‘It’s not that bad, lets keep it in perspective’. It makes Jenny a lot less stressed, makes the world a lot more fun for her.“

Although Russell is not yet confident enough to call himself an actor – “I tend to say ‘I’m doing some acting at the moment’” – he’s picking up clues that the writers see him as a long-term addition to the show.

“Sometimes I read the scripts now and wonder if there seems to be a bit of me informing the character. There’s some physical comedy associated with crazy and ridiculous dance moves. I have a reputation on set of being a bit clumsy, like a baby giraffe, and there are elements of that creeping into Gabe’s character, where he is a bit awkward.”

So does Russell feel he made the right move? “I pinch myself every day that I can wake up and actually do something I love, rather than something I just tolerated.”

Winners and Losers starts on Seven at 8.45pm Tuesday

Don’t call it The Arts

Despite its recent ratings success, the ABC remains quaintly eccentric in its programming decisions. The latest example is broadcasting The Mix, a show that covers movies, theatre and music, at 7.30 on a Saturday night – the moment when its target audience is most likely to be out attending the entertainments discussed in the show.

The Mix’s host, James Valentine, is as bemused as anyone by this. “People will find it,” he says hopefully. “They might watch it on their phone. They might record it and watch it on Sunday morning. They’re allowed to do that. It’s repeated a couple more times during the week. We may find that our biggest existence is on iview – well, I assume we’ll end up on iview.”

Valentine doesn’t like to use the term “the arts” for the subject-matter of The Mix, because that sounds old-fashioned. “There was this traditional ABC audience that subscribed to the Sydney Theatre Company, they enjoyed the symphony, they loved opera under the stars. That sort of audience has dwindled. An urban 30 to 60 year old is watching long-form American television, they’re seeing Springsteen at a winery, they’re going to the movies every couple of weeks and the opera twice a year … They might not go to everything, but as a well informed person, you want to know what’s happening in the world of creative activity.”

Valentine says he and his team are taking the approach of “Lets put it out there and then see what happens … If this were to be on ABC1, we would have had 12 months of development. But because it’s on News24, I’m proudly saying we are doing this on the fly. We’ll let the audience guide us. In three weeks we’ll be saying ‘this bit doesn’t work’ and in six months, we’ll be saying ‘you know what, this could be an hour’.

The Mix is on ABC News24 at 7.30pm on Saturdays, repeated at various times across various platforms.

The Tribal Mind column, by David Dale, appears in a printed form every Sunday in The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age and also as a director's cut on this website, where it welcomes your comments.

David Dale teaches communications at UTS, Sydney. He is the author of The Little Book of Australia - A snapshot of who we are (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark The Tribal Mind.